of her having been, as he phrased it, “Just like anyone else, just like I am ...” had shown him that not only for strangers, for people who are mere names in newspapers, do the hard things of life lie in wait.  There was always this something waiting to spring—­that might or might not show teeth and claws any time in life, that did not, in the form of an out-of-the-ordinary fate such as Hilaria’s, often touch even on the fringe of knowledge, but that nevertheless was shown to be possible.  That was the rub, that was what he had been aware of ever since.  Life was not a simple going-forward, lit by splendid things, marked maybe by the usual happenings such as the death of parents, and even friends; but it could hold such grim things as this....  Once one had seen what tricks life could play there was no trusting it in quite the same way again.  That such happenings should be possible would have seemed incredible till the realisation of Hilaria drove it home.  Of no use to say that these things were the exception.  They could still happen.

And now Killigrew—­before his natural time, though not so violently as had been the case with the other two old playmates.  Killigrew had lived his life very thoroughly, though he had always loved not well but too wisely.  Sitting there on the lonely moor amid the ruined china-clay works, with only the sounds of bird and beast breaking the still air, Ishmael seemed to himself as though suspended in a state that was neither space nor time, when independent of either he could roam the past as the present, and even the future as well.  It was as though time were cut out of one long endless piece as he had often imagined it as a little boy, when he had been puzzled that it was not as easy to see forwards as backwards, and been pricked by the feeling that it was merely a forgotten faculty which at any moment hard straining, if only it lit on the right way, could regain.  For the first time for many years he had a glimpse of the pattern of life instead of only the intricacies, seemingly without form, of each phase.  Killigrew and, in a much less degree—­but, as he now saw, hardly less keenly—­Hilaria, had both so affected the web of his life, not in action, but in thought, that without them he would either have learnt different lessons or the same lessons quite differently.  Even Judith, Carminow, and all the rest of the people who had impinged in greater or less degree, went to make the pattern, though not always, as with Killigrew, Hilaria, and Polkinghorne, could he see any one definite thing that they had been the means of making clear to his groping vision.  For we cannot know people with even the lightest degree of intimacy without both taking from them and giving to them.  Externally it may be only two or three people in life who have had the influencing of it, but each casual encounter has helped to prepare us for those people.